Overprotective adults avoid discussing suffering with their children, with the hope that it will protect them from it.Your goal is to make progress to avoid suffering. In other words, push yourself to the limit of your ability and challenge yourself. Walk the line between order and chaos, where life is stable enough but also unpredictable enough to provoke personal growth.If everyone did this, many society-level problems would be solved. Don’t worry about other problems – fix your own first. Take responsibility for your own life.It also rejects thousands of years of development of virtue and how to live properly.Īs a solution, in his 12 Rules for Life list, Peterson focuses on individual responsibility.

Moral relativism tolerates all ideas to avoid being “judgmental,” and prevents adults from telling young people how to live. In contrast, he rejects the ambiguity of moral relativism, the idea that good and evil are subjective opinion and that every belief has its own truth. In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson argues that there is a right and wrong way to conduct your life. In the absence of clear rules and a moral compass, people are prone to nihilism, existential angst, and misery. There is no scientific code of ethics that inherited the stabilizing role of religion. For much of history this function was served by religion, with rules handed down by gods and supernatural surveillance of behavior.īut take away religion, and a void remains. Most humans crave order and meaning in their existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world. Learn the key points of the 12 Rules for Life rule list, and get a summary of each of the 12 Rules below. The key point: individual responsibility.

Famous author Jordan Peterson lays out 12 simple rules on how to conduct your life. ġ2 Rules for Life is one of the bestselling books in recent times. Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of '12 Rules for Life' by Jordan Peterson.

12 rules beyond order